


Upside Down

by Mustachioedmoose



Category: Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Shock, surprise you have a kid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 16:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15666756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mustachioedmoose/pseuds/Mustachioedmoose
Summary: It has been years since Leon thought about the girlfriend that had broken up with him the night before he was supposed to report for his first day of duty in Raccoon City. In his line of work, looking forward is the only way to survive, so it only makes sense. And a lot of people from those days assume he's dead anyway. But when she turns up on just an average day grocery shopping with his current love and asks to speak to him privately, he has no idea how she's going to turn his world on its head.





	Upside Down

**Author's Note:**

> This was something a Tumblr buddy challenged me to do for fun, but it doesn't fit well into the main fic, at least not yet, so I thought I'd post it separately. :)

   It was a rare quiet day for himself and Angela, that rainy Saturday. Angela had no agents in the field for the next two weeks – “The fucking planets must have aligned and are about to explode,” she’d said when she’d seen her schedule – and Leon had no upcoming missions for at least a week. They’d settled on trying to relax as much as possible. Angela had been traveling quite often for the sake of her agents in recent weeks, and Leon looked back on all the interruptions to his vacations over the past years, and they’d both decided that staying at home sounded much nicer.

   They were standing in the International foods aisle of the grocery store down the street, giggling like teenagers over a can of spotted dick that Angela had found, when she’d spotted something in the Indian section of the aisle that she said she’d wanted to try thanks to Hunnigan talking it up, some kind of spicy sauce, he wasn’t sure. His eyes wandered absentmindedly over to the tortilla chips and he was browsing through the selection of salsas when he felt a tentative hand on his shoulder. Without really thinking about it, he turned around to see who it was. His heart just about stopped in his chest.

   It was Marie. It was his ex-girlfriend. The one who had broken up with him just before he’d left for Raccoon City.

   It was like his brain slammed on the brakes. He couldn’t say anything, couldn’t do anything except stare. In a weird way, he thought vaguely, he should be thanking her. By breaking up with him, it had delayed his departure to Raccoon because he’d been too distraught to do anything that night except drink, and that delay had been what had kept him alive. But that wasn’t exactly something you said to someone, “Hey, sorry I disappeared but thanks for breaking my heart.” Nervously, he glanced back over his shoulder to see if he could find Angela, and his heart sunk when he saw that she was still at the opposite end of the aisle and hadn’t even noticed what was going on.

   “Hi,” Marie said in a quiet, shaky voice, her brown eyes wide and almost teary. It took a few seconds, but Leon’s brain then stepped heavily on the accelerator and realized that he had to say something back.

   “Um…h-hey, Marie,” he replied, reaching up to scratch behind his head awkwardly.

   “What are you doing here?” he continued, internally wincing when he saw Marie narrow her eyes slightly and realized that that had come out much harsher than he had intended.

   “I’m here in D.C. for business,” was her reply. “I saw you on the news last night.  You were standing behind the president. I couldn’t believe it, but it was definitely you.”

   He gave a non-committal shrug, hardly daring to believe that any of this was really happening. The circumstances were just too strange. “Yeah,” he said, “I work for the government now.”

   “Leon, it’s been twenty years since I last saw you. I thought you were dead.”

   Leon kicked himself mentally. As soon as he had gotten out of Raccoon alive and with Sherry in tow, he’d meant to call her, multiple times, he really had. But then StratCom had caught up with him, removed Sherry from his possession and had essentially told him that he had no choice but to join up with them. He hadn’t even been allowed phone calls except one, and he’d used it to call his mom so that at least his family knew he was alive.

   “I…I know” was the only thing he could think to say in response. “Life just…just sort of got in the way.”

   “Hi!” came a bright and sparkling voice to his right. He turned his head to look and it was Angela, with a smile warm enough that he couldn’t tell if it was fake or not. She had a few grapes in her hand, ones she had likely taken from a sample tray, and she was popping them nonchalantly in her mouth. He felt a twinge of guilt, feeling like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, which didn’t make sense. This was just Marie. They hadn’t seen each other in years. There was nothing for anybody to worry about.

   Despite that, he felt his heart drop when Angela reached out her left hand for Marie to shake, her right hand being occupied with those grapes, and introduced herself. Marie reciprocated, but Leon saw her eyes travel to Angela’s hand and settle on the engagement ring. He could practically hear the gears in his head go in to overdrive. He had a feeling that Marie was going to want to catch up and he wasn’t entirely sure what he would say. The ruse that he’d been able to keep up with his family, that he was still a cop and so was Angela, probably wouldn’t work with her, especially now that she’d seen him on TV working protective detail for the president. There was a limit to how much he could say, however, about what had really happened. Any hint of what really went on, and he could be labeled a traitor for breach of security. He didn’t have much time to think because Marie’s eyes turned to him.

   “Leon, do you…do you mind?” she pleaded, motioning towards the front of the store where the little attached café was. He looked over at Angela, almost hoping that she would say no, that they were busy, maybe another time, but her expression was frustratingly neutral. She shrugged and took their shopping cart from him, saying she would finish up for them and to text her when he was on his way home.

   Without any other choice, Leon followed Marie to a small round table in the corner of the cafe. She declined his offer of a coffee, rendering his last-ditch attempt to at least buy himself a little time to compose himself before he had to face her useless. He spent the next minute or so staring at his hands on the tabletop, hating the awkward silence with a fiery passion. He glanced up and she was fiddling with her purse, looking as though she had about as much idea of what to do as he did.

   “So what are you doing in D.C.?” he blurted out, mostly to kill the silence dead. “Do you still live in Virginia?”

   She shook her head, still not looking at him. “No, I live in New York State now. Much more opportunities for book publishers up there.”

   “Oh, so you got to pursue that? How do you like it?”

   Marie was blushing. “I’m surprised you remember that that was my dream.”

   Leon had no response. He was a little stung that she thought he might forget. It _had_ been a very long time, but her entire senior year of college and throughout that summer, becoming a publisher and moving to New York had been all she could talk about.

   “I’m here for a conference. I just got in last night and flipped on the news for background noise as I was reading some papers. I just happened to look up and there you were on TV. It was hard to tell at first, you were behind other people, but it was definitely you. I mean, I almost had a heart attack. Thinking all these years that you were dead…

   “I came here today because the food at the conference is awful. Yelp said that this place had a pretty good hot bar. And there you were. In the flesh. I thought my heart was gonna burst out of my chest.”

   Leon snorted a laugh, though he didn’t think anything was particularly funny. Hearts bursting out of chests? He was feeling the same thing right at that very moment. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was about to happen, that Marie was going to tell him something else, and he couldn’t put his finger on why. But she was asking him, almost helplessly, what he’d been up to since that fateful night in 1998. He took just a little too long to come up with an answer, scrambling to find the right words that wouldn’t be an outright lie without giving away too much.

   “W-well, you know,” he said with a slight shrug, “I ended up in government work after Raccoon. Nothing special, just protective stuff.”

   Marie was nodding distractedly, her face growing redder by the second. A sense of dread settled heavily on Leon’s shoulders. Whatever it was that she needed to tell him, it was about to come out.

   “Leon,” Marie sighed, breathing out forcefully as though trying to decide whether to say it or not. “Leon, you have a son.”


End file.
